171 



appliances. There may be ebbs and flows in this 

 tide of advancement, just as there were ebbs and 

 flows among the old nationalities of Western Asia 

 ajid Europe, but in the long run the current has ever 

 been forward. Can we cease, with all the experience 

 of the past, and all the knowledge of the present 

 before us, to believe that the current will continue to 

 be forward still 1 



Nor can progress stop with the white man. In 

 virtue of the great law of cosmical progression, the 

 white will be superseded by higher varieties, and the 

 man of the future will excel the man of the present, 

 even more than the most exalted European philosopher 

 excels the wretched Bushman or Andamaner. Nor 

 will this'^cent be restrictedHso— his^ physical nature 

 merely, for the nobler varieties have hitherto been the 

 more intellectual, and thus things impossible and ia- 

 comprehensible now will in the future become possible 

 and easy of comprehension.* To gainsay this were to 



* Participating in this opinion, tut applying it to his o\vn special 

 field of study, Professor Owen has the foUowing in the preface to 

 his Compa/rative Anatomy and Physiology of the Vertebrata: — "In 

 the lapse of ages, hypothetically invoked for the mutation of 

 specific distinctions, I would remark that man is not likely to 

 preserve his longer than contemporary species theira. Seeing the 

 greater variety of influences to which he is subject, the present 

 characters of the human kind are likely to be sooner changed than 

 those of lower existing species. And with such change of specific 



